PeaceBang

Get Thee Behind Me, Conde Nast!

I just got an e-mail offer for a year’s subscription to both Allure and Glamour for only TWENNY BUCKS!!!

I am so tempted.

I love the photos. I love that I can get lost in serious, serious discernment about face creams for thirty minutes when one of those things comes in the mail. I love the ridiculous outfits and the inspiration for my own fashionable-fat-girl sartorial efforts. I love that I actually tear out pages and bring them to Sephora to get products, thereby proving that I am a first class suckah consumer and hypocrite, too, since I constantly deride consumerism.

I love the vapid articles.

But I just don’t think I can allow this to happen. I currently get Martha Stewart Living and Self (a huge disappointment) and Lucky (a magazine about shopping! How debauched!) and Real Simple and the UU World and the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin and the Christian Century for serious reads and I pick up celeb trash mags on occasion at the supermarket check-out. I read Allure and Glamour while my nails are drying at the manicurist. I buy Harper’s and the New Yorker on occasion.

I recycle two or three Trader Joe’s paper bags worth of paper products every two weeks; not too bad.

Aw geez. Someone environmentally conscious talk me out of this, willya?

Church Fires "A Joke"

What Tired Pro-Choice Rhetoric Hath Wrought

So the South Dakota guv has signed a bill effectively outlawing abortion in his state.

The Chicago Tribune writes about it here:

http://tinyurl.com/epfuk

I’ve heard an awful lot of hand-wringing and conservative-hating and doom forecast by women of my acquaintance over this one. And I say to all of them, “Yes, and what have you done in the past ten years to stem this tide, aside from tsk-tsking about it over your skim lattes? Did you write checks to NARAL or other legislative advocacy groups? Did you encourage your clergyperson to speak on behalf of safe, legal abortion and reproductive choice? Did you write letters to legislators and editors making an ethical case for reproductive choice? Did you testify anywhere, or attend a rally? Did you talk to young men and women about the urgency of this issue? Did you make a case for abortion whenever possible: a morally reasoned, ethical argument that goes beyond the old slogans and cliches? Because obviously, not enough of us did.”

We all knew this was coming, didn’t we?
We saw again and again the failure of our own outdated rhetoric and pro-choice slogans — we had to have seen it, as reproductive technologies made it impossible not to notice the hypocrisy of getting excited about “the baby” as soon as we viewed it on an ultrasound (4-8 weeks), but then to insist that it’s a “fetus” when we didn’t want to carry it to term. We kept chanting, “Get your rosaries out of my ovaries” and “If you can’t trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child,” and “Just say ‘no’ to sex with pro-lifers” and other phrases that eventually lost their sting (like fifteen years ago) and began to sound merely defensive and petulant. Meanwhile, young women rejected the label “feminist” and, never knowing a time before Roe V Wade, took up the “pro-life” mantle with self-righteous vigor.
They had no idea, none at all, what it would cost us all to lose the right to seek a safe abortion. It has slipped away little by little, state by state, clinic bombing by clinic bombing, and while we were getting fired up by the lawsuit against the pharmacist who refused to dispense the Morning After Pill, one governor was getting ready to consign every pregnant South Dakotan woman to government-enforced motherhood.

It’s easy to accuse lawmakers who outlaw safe, legal abortion as misogynist, and I truly believe they are. But the people elect the legislators. We elect them. Until those who frame the pro-choice message start abandoning the slogans and speaking truth about how women sometimes choose to make a human sacrifice to poverty, fear, rampant male immaturity and their own personal life goals, we’re going to keep losing this, state by state.

Not to say that speaking truth will persuade the opponents. But it might impress the younger ones coming up behind us who have never heard honest and frank, unvarnished talk about the many possible interpretations of “saving the life of the mother.” We’ve sentimentalized motherhood so much we’re terrified of what will happen when Mommy sits us down and explains that along with her great big mushy love for us, she’s got rage and wildness and freedom, and that sometimes she just does not have it in her to be consumed by the needs of another life. And that God created Woman, and only Woman, with a womb to grow a baby in and a vagina to deliver a baby out of, and that if Woman doesn’t want to grow a baby and deliver it, she will assure that she doesn’t have to, even risking her life to assure that she doesn’t have to.
Woman who doesn’t want to bring another life into this world has always known how to make arrangements to prevent that, and has done so since the beginning of time.

We can be realistic and make it possible for Woman to terminate a pregnancy in a safe and legal way, or we can decide as a society that if she gets pregnant, she has two realistic choices: she can be a mother at whatever cost to her (and her children), or she can be dead of a botched abortion.

And meanwhile, Men make laws to decide these things. And their Mamas are right proud of them.

Oscar AfterThoughts

I just hope we’ve seen the end of the geriatric hair do’s among Hollywood starlets. I don’t think I can take another year of Charlize Theron and Reese Witherspoon in demure granny buns.

Jon Stewart, thank you for mercilessly mocking the Hollywood hypocrites, even though they’ll never ask you back. Best lines:

(after a series of clips showing big moments from social justice-themed films):
“And none of those things were ever an issue again after those films came out.”

(about halfway through the interiminable telecast after about the fourth montage of film clips):
“Good God. I’m waiting for the tribute to montages…. We’re out of clips! We have no more clips! People send in your clips… even if they’re on Beta!”

(referring to the illegal practice of bootlegging films):
“Do not pirate tapes, America. These are the people you’re stealing from. Some of these women hardly had enough money to cover their breasts!”

Puncture away, Jon Stewart. We love you!

I still can’t believe “Crash” won.

The Christian Century

For awhile there I was devouring the Christian Century from cover to cover the minute it arrived. Of late, though, the issues have been very uninteresting. I’m so disappointed.

Are others feeling the same way?

I can’t tell you how pleasant it is, and how great…

I can’t tell you how pleasant it is, and how great for my bronchitis, that my heat went out 24 hours ago.

I do have heat in the kitchen and in the two guest bedrooms, so the cat and I will be bunking down on a twin bed tonight. Oh joy.

P.S. The Albuterol isn’t really working that well at all. I’m going to have to do Nyquil tonight.

Movie Mash-Ups

Very clever, although the comments section is lame:

http://tinyurl.com/nulgm

Huffington was cute on the Stephen Colbert Report, and he was in rare form. Did you catch it?

Hollywood Update And Other Random Nothings

To think that dreck like “Crash” gets nominated for Best Picture while something like “The 40-Year Old Virgin” gets bupkus just confirms my sense that Hollywood people are impossibly self-important schmucks who have no appreciation for the art of comedy.

Speaking of which, I am so afraid of the new “Pink Panther” remake with Steve Martin that I shudder to think it might end up in my Netflix queue by accident, and I don’t think I could bear it. I love Steve Martin, I honor Steve Martin. Steve, what hast thou done? And why?

I loved “The 40-Year Old Virgin.” It was silly and the chest waxing scene went on way too long, but it was a film about male friendship and the comedy performances were terrific. I don’t know if people have any idea how hard it is to sustain an entire picture with such broad comedic performances, all of which managed to be human and tender and loveable as well. Major accomplishment, and it was a real ensemble piece where most of the characters were in most of the scenes m– unlike “Crash,” which was touted as an ensemble piece, but was really a pastiche of two and three-person scenes. Please. Don Cheadle’s dialogue — in fact, his entire role — could not have been more cheezy and contrived. Kudos to him for managing to get away with his actorly dignity intact. There was some bad acting going on in “Crash,” people, and one gag-inducing bit of dialogue after the next.

File under “How Americans Get So Fat”: I bought these things called “Sun Snacks” — doesn’t that sound healthy? — because the package is all warm and golden and it says, “NATURAL: no preservatives, no artificial flavor, no artificial colors, 0 grams trans fat.” You know what these things are? They’re just potato chips. Yes, they’re (and I quote) “thick cut sea salted potato chips” but they’re just plain old chips and I bought them because they said, “Come into the sun” on the back, and I figured, “Well, I can’t get to St. Bart’s right now but, I mean, this could be just as good.”
Come into the fat is more like it. I was so sick yesterday, hacking my way around Whole Foods Market. I did get a bunch of juice oranges and some other healthy items but look what I’m digging into first.

I’m reading a wonderful book about the Yiddish language called Born To Kvetch. It’s the first book I’ve ever read that gives an unvarnished, insider’s perspective on what old world Jews really think /thought of Christians, and I love it. Fascinating anecdotes and great linguistics. Recommended.

Albuterol

Albuterol
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

So I sez to the doc, “Doc, ya gotta help me. All I do is cough. I cough so hard my eyeballs pop out. I cough all night long. My coughing keeps all the dogs in the neighborhood up. I’m shaking loose my guts, doc. I get no rest. I’m like an old lady now. I can’t put on my eyeliner straight, I’m coughing so much.”

So the doc says, “You got bronchitis. You got to breathe this asthma medicine and it will give you a kick, like you just drank sixteen cups of coffee, but you won’t be coughing. At least I think you won’t.”

So I go to the pharmacist, the cute red haired guy at the Stop & Shop, and he says, “Hey, I like your haircut,” and he gives me this magical little canister of Albuterol and I shoot myself in the mouth with it and bam, the coughing stops — mostly — and I take a five hour nap and now I feel like a new woman.

Thanks gods.

God is Gonna Getchya

I was in Trader Joe’s the other night when I heard one of the workers complain that he had been called up for jury duty. I thought to myself, “Boy am I glad that’s not ME!” and then wondered if I would finally get summonsed (not “summoned,” but “summonsed”) since I never have had that honor before.

The next day I got the bloody summonses in the mail.

*groan*

That’s just how I want to spend my day off in a few weeks: getting up way earlier than usual, driving to a really skanky city, and biding my time in a courthouse. Psyched.

I’m off to the doctor to see if we can find some solution to this horrific, chronic cough. I just want to lay down and die.